Starting Small
by ncfan
Summary: That first lesson with the younger students. [Post-canon.]


I own nothing.

* * *

Even with Charles's apparent determination to forgive and forget, Erik still counted it a rather startling display of trust to ask him to lead a session in the Danger Room with some of the younger students. It was to be a _non-violent_ lesson, Charles had emphasized, and Erik had snorted and raised an eyebrow at him, to ask if Charles thought him incapable of teaching children without violence entering into the picture.

"_If the complaints of the other instructors are any indication, they may _drive_ you to violence_."

The last time Erik had checked, neither Wolverine, Storm nor Beast had raised any children of their own. That probably accounted for it.

He thought he might have underestimated just how many "younger" students were living here, though.

The gaggle of children he was teaching today, six in total, were all loud, brash children, most of them quite ready to boast about what they could do (And Erik suspected that at least some of them were exaggerating about the extent of their abilities and just how much control they had over them, much as Pietro had been wont to do at their age). But they were friendly, and listened to him readily, which Erik was grateful for. Unlike some of the others, they were clearly willing to believe that he had "reformed. Much the same as the rest, though (sans Charles, of course), they seemed not to understand that all "reforming" meant was that Erik and Charles had returned to the arrangement they'd had before the former began forming a separate faction, a polite arrangement of agreeing to disagree and accepting that they would be far better off working with one another than against one another. Anyways…

In the absence of any real knowledge of just how well these children performed (he had knowledge of their powers but Charles had deliberately withheld everything else; he wouldn't be making this easy, it seemed), Erik supposed he was going to have to try something simple. He hit upon a solution quickly. It was easy enough to adapt an exercise he'd performed with Pietro when the latter's mutation had first emerged.

(And it was nothing like the abortive attempts to help Wanda control her powers when they had first emerged far too soon, nothing like the fruitless attempts to help her control the anger that had always been there. Erik doubted that anything existed in the world any longer that could make him feel so helpless.)

"Try to catch the ball."

Judging from the groans, the kids were apparently used to something a bit more exciting.

"Don't complain." He was distinctly reminded of the face Pietro, who had admittedly been a lot younger than most of these kids, had made when he'd first heard what his father wanted him to do. He hadn't complained—Erik had surmised that Pietro behaved very differently around him than he did around his peers—but his eyes had glazed over enough that Erik could tell that he was thinking much the same as this lot were muttering. "I want to see—firsthand, mind—what you all can do. Any future lessons won't be nearly this easy."

With Pietro, it had been simple enough. After they'd found somewhere secluded enough, Erik had taken a metal ball, made it fly through the air low enough for Pietro to catch, and told him to try to catch it. The first time they did this, it took Pietro over half an hour to get his hands on the ball. The boy may have been fast, but despite his interests in soccer and basketball he wasn't terribly nimble with his newfound speed. Neither was he very good at stopping on a dime, not at the first. They'd had to cut these sorts of training sessions short on more than one occasion because Pietro had tripped over a tree root and sprained his ankle or ran into a tree and broken his nose, or something like that. He still remembered how frustrated his son had gotten the first time, when he would zip in and out amongst the trees, trying to catch the ball, always in vain.

With practice, Pietro's times had gotten better. From forty minutes to thirty, to twenty-five to twenty. It had seemed like fifteen would be the best he would ever do, until one day he'd caught the ball in five minutes, and _not_ because Erik had been trying to go easy on him. The huge grin that had stolen over Pietro's face when he realized what he'd done still rose to the surface of Erik's mind in odd moments, usually when he was away and hadn't seen his son in days, or weeks, or months.

Working together, it only took the six children about ten minutes to catch the ball. A lot better than Pietro had done the first time around, but they had the advantage of being older and more accustomed to their powers than Pietro had been all those years ago. Erik suspected that they would have gotten it earlier, but unlike Pietro, some of them weren't constrained by how high they could stretch their arms, so he didn't bother to keep the ball hovering at that sort of height over the ground.

When they all started cheering and jumping up and down like much-younger children, Erik was struck by how familiar all this seemed.

They reminded him so much of Pietro at that age (or approximate age, when the boy was still getting the hang of his powers) that it hurt to remember. Hurt to remember the easy smile that had eventually gone away, hurt to acknowledge his own responsibility in that.

(It hurt worse to know that he had no idea what Wanda had been like at this age, but that he could very well guess, and knew that she had been nothing like this. The worst pain came from the knowledge that he would never know what Anya would have been like at this age, that she had never had that opportunity and he would never see her grown. That was the pain that had dulled over the years, but which Erik knew from bitter experience could sharpen easily with the right impetus.)

But he watched them cheer, and couldn't help but crack a smile. He'd forgotten the joy that could be found in teaching. Maybe Erik had a soft spot for brash children, after all.


End file.
